10 things coming up in the Chichester area

Petworth Festival about to begin...

1 Music. Petworth Festival. Min Kym (violin) with Ian Brown (piano), Saturday, July 21, 7.30pm, Champs Hill. Following Min Kym’s revealing talk at November’s Literary Festival at which she discussed the shocking experience of having her Stradivarius violin stolen, we hear the international Korean/British violinist as she performs a recital featuring three works central to the solo violin repertoire and including Bartok’s rhapsody based on Hungarian folk melodies.

2 Family fun. Petworth Festival. Bignor Park Alive! (family), Sunday, July 22, from 1pm. Petworth Festival presents the festival equivalent of a musical and theatrical treasure hunt in the beautiful grounds, gardens and woods of Bignor Park. Audiences of all ages will be encouraged to go in search of more than 25 different happenings taking place in glades, gazebos, follies and clearings around the park. The performing company includes Travelling Light Circus’s Playground of Illusions, Handmade Theatre’s Too Many Cooks, This Is My Theatre’s Alice in Wonderland, Nearly There Yet’s Memory Man, groups of top achieving young musicians from the Petworth-based West Sussex Music Trust and the choral forces of Petworth-based choir, the Leconfield Singers.

3 Art. Until July 29 at Emsworth Museum, Town, Land and Sea, a display of paintings by Angela Loader. Original paintings, prints and a new range of greetings cards can be bought during the exhibition.

4 Music. Petworth Festival. The Elgar Connection 1 with the Fibonacci Sequence, Sunday, July 22, St Mary’s Church, Petworth, 7.30pm. The first of two concerts in which the Petworth Festival celebrates the music of Elgar and founding festival director, Robert Walker, both of whom lived and composed at Brinkwells near Fittleworth. The Fibonacci Sequence celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2014.

6 Music. Petworth Festival. Piano Extravaganza, Sunday, July 22, 7.30pm, St Mary’s Church. One of the great celebratory events of the 40th-anniversary festival, the festival welcomes the combined talents of four versatile pianists: Ben Waters, Harry the Piano, James Pearson and Joe Stilgoe - together with two fine Steinway instruments.

7 Art. This summer Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery focuses on the work of photographer Dorothy Bohm (b 1924), revealing her personal connections to the county of Sussex. Sussex Days: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm runs until Sept 2.

8 Music. Petworth Festival. Come and Sing... ABBA!, with Ben Parry, Saturday, July 21, 1pm, St Mary’s Church. The director of the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, Ben Parry, takes you through your paces in versions of Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, Knowing Me Knowing You and numerous other numbers from the ABBA songbook. The workshop will culminate in a mini-concert at 3.45pm. Friends and family are welcome to come to St Mary’s at 3.30pm.

9 Art. Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings, until September 16. This major touring exhibition, featuring 80 female artists from 1854 to the present day, has at its heart the pioneering writings of novelist Virginia Woolf. It seeks to show how her perspectives on feminism and creativity have remained relevant.

10 Music. Petworth Festival. Florian Mitrea (piano), Saturday, July 21 ,12 noon, Leconfield Hall . A member of the Royal Academy’s Piano Faculty, the Romanian/British pianist Florian Mitrea was a double-laureate in the 2017 Scottish, 2015 Hamamatsu and 2014 ARD Munich international piano competitions and 2016 joint winner of Verona.